YourSoMe

YourSoMe: Short for Your Social Media, is a place where you can catch up with the latest buzz in Social Media. You can check out some interesting campaigns, mind boggling strategies and useful tools. Stay tuned!

Facebook adds contact form to ad dashboard, aims to respond in 4 hours

Via: insidefacebook.com

Some advertisers are seeing a prominent new “contact us” button in Facebook’s self-serve ad dashboard. According to the site, the global marketing solutions team will strive to respond to all questions within four hours.

The button, which appears above campaign information, leads to a short form and includes a note about the team’s business hours. This effort comes at a time when many small and mid-sized businesses feel Facebook is too focused on the interests of major brands and is ignoring their own. If Facebook becomes more responsive to these advertisers, even through email, it could improve perception and solve some of issues that prevent businesses from spending more on the platform.

It is yet unclear how many advertisers have the new contact option and whether ad spend has an effect on who sees it. The account we saw the prompt with has already spent thousands on the site, but nowhere near the hundreds of thousands required to be considered a “premium” advertiser. Another account, which spent less than $100, did not show the contact form.

Facebook has expanded its sales and marketing staff considerably in the past year, and it has more than 100 open positions related to account management and client support. With more people on the team, the company will be better suited to handle the load of questions advertisers have and provide additional resources for businesses of all sizes — for example, creating an ad demo tool for non-premium ads. As advertisers come to better understand the platform and see evidence of Facebook serving their interests, they will be more likely to run paid campaigns on the site. 

Names of some Android Handsets which they share with another unlikely type of products: condoms!

Names of some Android Handsets which they share with another unlikely type of products: condoms!

Amazing promotion combining the new iPad with Magic!

Future Of Marketing & Advertising : Online Marketing (Versus Offline Marketing)

By Hardik Dhruve 

                            

To start up with let me say that I am no advocate of online marketing who doesn’t believe in offline marketing. 

Offline advertising and marketing have driven sales for generations. Newspaper, magazine, television, radio and billboard advertising have all been used in highly successful (and profitable) campaigns. They can help create and enhance a brand. They can lead new customers in your direction and they can help to maintain and grow relationships with your current clients and customers. 

The problem with offline marketing and advertising is that sometime it become extremely difficult if not impossible to  measure the success of a particular campaign.When justifying the costs of offline advertising and marketing, campaign managers often need to talk about such results in broad terms, emphasizing “brand enhancement,” or “customer awareness” because it is hard to precisely measure the impact of a single advertisement, no matter what the medium. 

Now here is where Online Marketing steps in with some advantage in online marketing you can get immediate feedback on your marketing efforts, budgets and revenue, change strategies more quickly and efficiently than you can offline marketing.

Here are just some of the advantages of online marketing 

  1.  Increased Flexibility (Making changes before it is too late):  The main advantage with offline marketing is that you can come to know within a week or a months time whether your marketing campaign is going to be successful or not. With the increasing use of web analytic and tools that are available online,you can see almost instantly if a campaign is working or not. With the help so these information you can quickly put an end to the existing camping or invest more in a successful one.
  2. Enhanced Tracking (Knowing the impact of the campaign): Online analytic’s, including Google Analytic’s , Facebook, Twitter and  YouTube Insights   give you the chance to benchmark your campaigns and then follow the results in real time. If a campaign isn’t performing well, you don’t have to wait a month to find out.
  3. Targeting Your Audience:  While magazines, newspapers and television shows all have “target audiences,” such targets can be fairly broad and imprecise. Often, a large segment of the target will have no interest in your product or services. Online marketing gives you the opportunity to be far more targeted towards the specific audience you are aiming for. By way of example, Facebook advertising can be narrowed so effectively that you can deliver an ad to a handful of people.
  4.  Immediate Results:  As I’ve said earlier in this article, traditional off-line advertising and marketing typically requires you to be extremely patient in getting results. There is often a disconnect between an off-line advertisement (e.g. television or a billboard) and an actual purchase. Now with the help of online Facebook Shops online marketing allows you to be a few clicks away from hitting the send button on your shopping cart.
  5. Multitude Platforms: With the help of Online Marketing you can get so many options to reach your potential and current clients and customers. Using benchmark, you can easily test the effectiveness of each of these marketing platforms and accordingly adjust your focus on budget and marketing campaigns accordingly.
  • E-Mail: Gives you the opportunity to deliver targeted messages with immediate calls to action. It is cheaper, easier to track and far more immediate than traditional direct mail campaigns.
  • Social Media: There is a reason why sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are so enormously popular. Users of these platforms are engaging in conversations. Much of the dialog is social in nature, but a large percentage of the discussions turn to business. These sites give you the opportunity to:
  • Enhance your brand
  • Make direct sales
  • Service your customers
  • Scout the competition
  • Find great potential partners and employees
  • Search Engine Marketing: Search engine marketing has revolutionized how companies go about getting their name out to a highly targeted audience. The person who goes to the search engine is one who is generally looking not just to buy, but to buy a specific item. The two key ways of using search engine marketing are Pay Per Click placements and Search Engine Optimization.
  • Pay Per Click (PPC): This can be an extremely effective way to drive “qualified” traffic to your site, but it can also be a very expensive way of doing it. A well thought out, PPC campaign will use keywords designed to attract the customers you want going to your site. But, great placement, especially for common keywords (i.e. sports car, mortgage, golf clubs), can cost you dearly. It might be nice to attract 10,000 visitors to your site, but if it costs you $5 per visitor, you had better be getting a lot more than $50,000 in sales or business for your efforts.
  • Search Engine Optimization (SEO): Search Engine Optimization is the process of enhancing the structure and content of your website in such a way that the major search engines naturally and organically drive traffic to your site by ranking it higher in search results. While this kind of traffic is “free,” the process of making your site stand out from the rest is not cheap at all. It requires both a significant investment of time and it requires a high level of expertise from the person creating the campaign. Unlike PPC, though, once a high placement has been established, that placement will continue to drive traffic with little or no additional costs incurred.
  • Blogs: If you offer something unique or have unique insights, then a well-written blog can be a great way to drive traffic to your site. Not only are blogs picked up directly by the search engines, the blogs can be noticed by other bloggers or on other major websites. When people link to your blog, it tells the Google’s of the world that you are a real player in your industry and such recognition results in higher placement.
  • Video: It may shock you, but YouTube just passed Yahoo as the No. 2 search engine. By creating an interesting, informative and creative video and posting it online, you create the opportunity for thousands, if not millions, to be exposed to your company, your brands and your services.
  • Newsletters: This is a terrific way to keep your current customers, clients and visitors informed of what is happening at your company. Retailers can tout new products or sales. Service providers can trumpet success stories. By providing information that is informative and useful to your subscriber base, you will create a revenue-generating platform that your subscribers will actually look forward to getting.
  • Banner Advertising: While click-through rates have been declining over the years, there is still a place in your online marketing arsenal for a well-crafted and well-targeted banner ad. If you can create an advertisement that captures the eye and creates a call to action, then you have an excellent chance of driving traffic to your site.


In conclusion, while there always remains a place for offline marketing and advertising, companies can’t afford to ignore the importance of online marketing.

Content Marketing, as we know it

By- Siddharth Sridhar (http://savvytech13.blogspot.in)  

Content marketing, as the name suggests, involves nothing more than to attract, acquire, and engage a clearly defined and understood target audience - with the objective of driving profitable customer action.

Basically, content marketing is the art of communicating with your customers and prospects without selling. It is non-interruption marketing.  Here information related to the product is delivered to the buyer, instead of pitching your product or service hence making the buyer more aware and intelligent with information. The essence of this content strategy is the belief that if we, as businesses, deliver consistent, ongoing valuable information to buyers, they ultimately reward us with their business and loyalty.

Depending on your business and the expected outcome of marketing, you can offer valuable content to your audience in the form of blogs, whitepapers, case studies, guides, infographics, eBooks, to name a few.

Just as oxygen powers the body, content marketing powers online marketing success thus enabling the company to attract customers and build a brand image. This infographic created by ContentPlus explores how successful content marketing can help businesses grow online.

                             

After Pinterest for the ladies, It’s Gentlemint for the gentlemen

After Pinterest has been almost monopolized by the ladies, pinning their dresses and laces, recipes and tips, little space has been left for men. Although we men are contributing heavily in the humor, tech and automobile categories of Pinterest, it still feels tiny in front of the massive wave of content submitted by our female counterparts. Well, men can have their own thing now. There is something called Gentlemint out there, touted as “Pinterest for Men”. 

Though it was not possible for me check it out as a member, here is the rough idea of how Gentlemint works.Instead of pinning stuff, Gentlemint lets user to “tack” things (Like a Sir!) to the site. Most popular tacks on the site currently have alcohol, pictures of legendary men, motivational quotes, Man food (read junk food), some geeky stuff and some more alcohol.

So if you are man enough say HA-ROO, beat you Spartan shield, and join in!

(Note: Only Sign-up for beta version is currently available. If anyone has already scored an account, do share an invite)

                        the image that congratulates you after you sign up on Gentlemint